Apurar, cielos, pretendo
2017 · 20m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Alfred Giancarli
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Esperanza, a young woman with an extremely pessimistic point of view on life, returns to work on Monday morning after spending the weekend drinking; seeing her in no condition to work, her colleagues intervene to try to convince her to change her bad habits, but Esperanza is not up for that, in a hard and bitter look at those whose daily life is a meaningless farce and an unbearable burden.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the intervention-scene redemption arc, but Giancarli just lets Esperanza sit in her refusal—the film's real subversiveness isn't the premise, it's the nerve to make her unbearable *and* right.
A lean, formally controlled descent into meaninglessness that recalls Antonioni's handling of modern ennui, though the dark-comedy register keeps it from settling into that lineage too comfortably—deliberately unresolved in its tonal allegiances.
The film lives in those moments when colleagues try to convince Esperanza and she simply doesn't perform recovery for them—it's the *refusal* to cut to a moment of breakthrough that transforms a familiar scenario into something bleak and true.